hockey

On Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 10:50 p.m., Halifax Regional Police responded to an accident on Freshwater Trail near Dartmouth's Russell Lake. A car had smashed into a parked vehicle, causing extensive damage. Sources say an open bottle of alcohol was found in the car, and police charged a young man they arrested at the scene with impaired driving.

That young man was Brandon Vuic, a 19-year-old forward with the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League's Mooseheads. Three days later, on Oct. 10, the team played the first of three back-to-back holiday weekend games at Scotiabank Centre. Vuic was listed simply as a "healthy scratch."

The Rogers takeover of hockey is breathtaking. But I don't just mean breathtaking, and not just takeover. It's more like absorption. The way you absorb food, and transform it so that it becomes you, literally. Rogers has become hockey, or aims to.

Hockey used to have sponsors, which started with Esso back in the day, and broadcasters, which was the CBC. But none of them devoured hockey or claimed to be it. Yet many stories on the new season were about Rogers, not the teams. It's as if Rogers isn't either; it's both, and some mighty new entity.

Through the years, hockey has helped define this nation. Like the countless lakes and rivers that carve the land just begging to be skated upon once frozen, the collective love for hockey connects Canadians.

As the country has evolved, hockey has endured, seeping into the very core of the culture. The game is treasured. The countless Stanley Cups. The '72 Summit Series. The gold medals in Vancouver and Sochi. What happens on the ice is a point of national pride, along with names like Gretzky and Messier and Henderson and Crosby.

Big Telecom is running scared of cord-cutters and is doing what it takes to block them from watching their favourite shows online. It looks like Rogers is even planning to block Canadians from watching Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) online. They want to trap Canadians in expensive and outdated service plans and they’re using their power and control to do so. It’s not too late to push back by telling decision-makers at the CRTC to put Canadians first when it comes to our digital future.

Eighteen months ago, I launched a project called Left Hook, an online journal that would bring together progressive and thoughtful sports fans to write about the games we love from a critical perspective. The world of sport is dominated by some pretty unpleasant politics, from sexism and homophobia to nationalism and warmongering. The hope with Left Hook was that writing would lead to talking, to organizing and to challenging the domain of sport to include the people and voices it usually ignores.

| The CBC will continue to broadcast Hockey Night in Canada while Rogers will have the final say on sports personalities and control all ad revenue from the games. We speak with columnist Rick Salutin.

On Tuesday, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced a 12-year, $5.2-billion deal awarding Rogers Communications exclusive rights to all NHL games on all platforms -- cable, internet and mobile. In an instant, the Canadian sports media landscape shifted. TSN, the Canadian sports broadcasting leader for years, appeared to lose everything. Meanwhile, the CBC's venerable Hockey Night in Canada franchise, still reeling from losing their famous anthem a few years earlier (to none other than TSN), was reduced to a mote in the eye of Rogers' massive telecommunications network.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) hosted the first annual Toronto Police vs. Artists hockey game on October 18 2013, taking place at the Mattamy Rink in the fomer Maple Leaf Gardens. After the hockey game there was a panel discussion at the 519 Church Street Community Centre entitled Freedom to Create: Art, Freedom of Expression and Power.

In the lead up to the event, the CCLA asserted that, in the fallout of police brutality during the G20 protests, "animosity and generalizations [about the police] are not helpful." They added that this event was about "building bridges between communities that seem to share little common ground" and would be "an important step in dialogue."